Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment. Why didn't I get a heart attack in my 50s like both grandfathers and my dad? Sure, I exercise a little (but I should do more, lose some more weight etc). But I also have magic statins and also take daily coated aspirin and some other things that weren't available in 1980 for my ancestors. Why didn't I get lung cancer like some family members? Because I never freaking smoked. The same ideas should apply to athletes.
Diseases of Affluence don't regularly affect elite athletes in their 20's. I would say that because of affluence in our culture, we actually have elite athletes. I come from a long line of artichoke farmers, but hell if I've ever grown one myself. Taking a few months off to climbs mountains as fast as I can to set some record is something I can do because I've broken free from my generational toiling.
> Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment.
The simplest predictor is "how many people practice a sport?"
Insofar as fitness for a particular athletic trial follows the central limit theorem, larger samples will open the door to more spectacular outliers. The relationship between total participants and the time it takes for a record to fall shows up in sport after sport.
The other factor is: new PEDs that are forbidden but difficult to detect at a given point in time. These affect some sports more than others. Periodically records in these sports are "reset" through administrative twiddling. For example, every 20 years or so Olympic Weightlifting weight classes get changed, meaning all the old records are essentially obsoleted.
Even if the number of new entrants to a sport per year stay constant, I think you'd expect records to continually fall as the cumulative sample over time gets larger and larger.
That said, yeah, them falling more rapidly is also helped by the training/equipment/nutrition/drugs/etc improvements.
The training, equipment etc improvements themselves follow population. More natural and designed experiments, more alternatives available, more accumulated know-how and theory.
But any given combination of factors is itself part of the athletic trial. The Soviet Russian system of weightlifting carefully husbanded the outstanding weightlifters they had to work with and so selected for athletes who responded well to that training. The Bulgarian system was based on masses of warm bodies, enormous drug regimens and ruthless elimination upon injury. It selected for athletes who responded well to drugs and weren't injury prone. Afficionados of the sport argue constantly about which is "better", since both turned out world record upon world record. But such a debate was beside the point: an athletic system selects whatever it is set up to select for. The rest of the effect is then down to numbers.
Yes, you'd expect records to always keep falling given a fixed distribution, but it will slow down fast. The expected maximum of _n_ random samples is roughly log(n) in size (formulas: https://www.gwern.net/Order-statistics ), so you need to increase dramatically to noticeably increase the maximum.
Or to put it another way, since a record is defined as 'beating all previous samples', the chance of the next sample setting a record is always 1/n. So if you have m entrants per year adding to that total n, the probability is always positive, but it quickly becomes very small.
>Clinical trials of aspirin in patients without cardiovascular disease have inconsistently demonstrated improvements in cardiovascular outcomes, with potential benefits countered by increased risks of clinically significant bleeding. The uncertain role of aspirin in primary prevention of cardiovascular events is reflected in contrasting recommendations offered by guideline bodies. The overall effect of this uncertainty has been a decline in aspirin prescribing for primary prevention over the past 5 to 10 years.
I have heard that risk, of bleeding. But people in my family tend to be killed by heart problems, not by bleeding. So it seems to me like the right trade off. As far as I know, none of my ancestors died from bleeding related issues.
> What do all of these athletes have in common? They were wearing next-generation running shoes.
Related but not mentioned: Elite sportspeople are getting paid orders of magnitude more than they have ever been in history, to promote next-generation running shoes.
Just the shoes eh? Mass communication/information and the ease at which we access it, and how it influences my belief systems is a huge shift for me. I've never been to an ultra, but I love listening to ultra athletes and they set a bar beyond what I would otherwise have thought possible in my amateur/pleasure exercise.
It's interesting that you bring up an ultra. I'm training for one in five months and while I'm unlikely to run the event itself (covid), I'm still training. Listening to elites talk about how they prepare has taught me a lot while reminding me that I'm still firmly in the camp of hobbyist. :)
Interestingly, I think we'd see the same thing in music if there were "records." I'm a musician, as are my kids, so I've observed youth music over the past half century. I think the technical ability of young classical musicians has increased over that time span, rather noticeably. I've brought this up with teachers, and they agree with me.
Kids are expected to play a difficult movement from a major concerto for their college audition -- pieces that were considered to be the domain of a handful of rare prodigies in my generation. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the Tchaikovsky in violin recitals.
Granted, whether this corresponds to an advance in the artistic dimension of music is an open question, one that probably has no objective answer.
I've noticed this too in other fields. I wonder if it's because of the internet? There's so many information out there. Not to mention there are so many sources you can look up to study. You can go to YouTube now and look up Tchaikovsky violin concerto and find a ton of videos that one might be able to study.
I only played the violin casually when I was young. But I would've loved if I had vast libraries of music, videos, etc. available to me in the 90's. I think I would've been much better.
A recent example for me is photography. When I started to learn photography about 5-6 years ago, I was able to find so many resources on the net to improve quickly. You can find so many examples of good photos of every genre these days. It would've been harder 15+ years ago if I had to scour magazines or photo books to find inspirations, or if I wanted to study a certain technique.
Some people have cited the Suzuki method, which became widespread after my time as a student. Naturally the people who mentioned that to me are teachers.
I was taught using the Suzuki book, but not the method. My teacher never told me listen to the record it came with. Of course, it wouldn't have done me any good since I didn't have a record player.
One piece my teacher wanted me to learn was Autumn by Vivaldi. I remember listening to my CD of Vivaldi's Four Seasons constantly to hear how a certain part should sound. Now only if I had a video, then I can see how they would've played it. :)
Indeed, the method is not strictly followed in the US. For one thing, American teachers tend to teach reading a lot earlier. But I believe the emphasis on ear training, playing in groups, and starting out learning by imitation, are beneficial.
Teachers of my generation were afraid that if you learned by ear, you'd never learn to read.
I'd go further. A lot of "classical" training now basically acknowledges that "reading" just isn't that relevant for a classical musician and wastes time when most of your repertory is memorized.
Sure, you need to be able to read enough to get through to the point that you can memorize a new piece. However, you don't need to be able to read at the level of, say, a studio musician who sees new and unfamiliar music every single day.
That's possible. A concert soloist might not need to be a strong reader, but very few of them can make a living doing only that. To get up to a decent income without a day job requires doing a lot of short-term and fill-in music, chamber music, subbing, etc.
Maybe I took to reading, to cover for my lack of practice. ;-) I switched to jazz after high school, and am now a double bassist. Though I'm not a full time pro, I've gotten a lot more work than I'd otherwise deserve thanks to being a fluent sight-reader and keeping my reading chops fresh.
Short time scale. I wonder how they'd actually compare to Paganini. Besides Saint-Saens, I don't know of a composer whose music would even serve as a benchmark beyond that skill level. I guess anybody could write trickier études, but musicality cannot be ignored.
It'd be interesting to go back and dig up old recordings. It would be problematic because early recordings would not have been wasted on things like kids audition/recital pieces, which now flood YouTube.
What we can do is look at how relatively recent generations have done with some of that old material such as the Paganini.
And of course musicality, which would definitely require recordings to review. Even the kids who play these pieces will tell you: Anybody can play the notes, the trick is to play them musically.
One thing I don't know is how prevalent that is, but I do know whether my own kids did those things. I also know quite a few of the parents, and have a sense for what their attitudes would be. But in the final analysis, the answer is, don't know.
I only saw the top of the article, but a major factor in track right now is the use of an electronic pacer. There will be a ring of lights on the inside line of the track. Stay ahead of the light and you're on record pace.
Yeah, they replied wrong. Icarus is about PEDs. But I do like the idea of some diehard track enthusiast being enthralled and depressed by a tell-all documentary about pacing lights.
Greyhound racing dogs have been paced by a mechanical rabbit for decades. I always assumed the reason something similar wasn't done for track was because it was deemed against the rules. And perhaps the rules simply changed, because I'm having a hard time thinking of pacing lights as innovative.
The infield is not the race area proper, it's the area inside the track. GP is referring to having a non-racer (though still a teammate) run alongside the track as a motivator/pacer for those actually on the track for the race itself.
The legal system does not work like this even though I see it all the time, and a lot from programmers.
You mostly cannot get off on a technicality like this. If they judge believe that a reasonable person thinks there was a human rabbit they can DQ you even if there are other explanations.
Same with all the plausible deniability with passwords etc, the judge can simple not believe you and put you in jail until you remember the password (even if you do not remember it).
>Same with all the plausible deniability with passwords etc, the judge can simple not believe you and put you in jail until you remember the password (even if you do not remember it).
In America, you can be compelled to surrender something you have, but not something you know.
So the jail you're waiting in while you remember you password is probably in Guantanamo Bay.
If only Guantanamo Bay was the only detention center lacking in accountability.
Even still, race directors have even wider latitude for DQs. In the end I suppose it ultimately comes down to propensity for those in disagreement to riot.
In some events (including top-level marathons like London or Berlin) pacing is legal as long as the pacer is themselves entered in the race. Historically records wouldn't count if the pacer didn't finish, but I don't think that's still the case.
For instance, in Roger Bannister's record-breaking four-minute mile run, Chris Brasher and Christopher Chataway acted as pacers. According to a prearranged plan, Brasher led the first two laps, then dropped back (and finished last). Chataway then led, until Bannister kicked with just over half a lap to go.
Why is pacing illegal? Unless the pacer runs right in front of the other runners to draft them along in their tailwind, in which case it would make sense, but otherwise urging them along? Seems like you can sabotage other teams by pacing them.
On track and field and running websites there is a lot more cynicism towards the rush of records that's taken place over the last year or so. Yes the new shoes probably help, but Covid has also made it difficult for drug testers to access athletes for random drug tests, many athletes have been able to take performance enhancing drugs with impunity over the last year.
My guess is the close quarters nature of drug testing (most protocols involve physical observation of the person giving the sample during the process) is a concern during COVID.
Because they cannot visit the athletes randomly. Because the athletes aren't training every day at a center, instead are training solo at lots of different places. Because much testing is tied to specific events (eg olympics) that have been cancelled. Cancel enough events and multi-month windows open where athletes know they will not be subject to testing.
And with fewer events, those that are still happening become much more important. If there is only one qualifying event on the calendar then there is all the more pressure to perform on that day. There is no point in saving anything for the rest of the season. So athletes will risk injury if that means doing a little better that one day. If they are hurt they know they will have have a long while to recover.
But the testing doesn't just take place at competitions. Athletes have to report where they are every day, and failure to do so leads to warnings and eventually sanctions. They can be tested at any time, but maybe various agencies have cut back on that during the pandemic.
It becomes more difficult as athletes move further away from standard training facilities. They still need to report their locations but those locations are now more scattered. That is IF athletes are in the system. With so many events cancelled and athletes looking at a year or more between competitions, many might not need to participate in anti-doping programs for extended periods of time.
Assuming that the various lockdown protocols allow it. Many countries have had (or still have) massive intra-country travel restrictions, some such as Italy had periods of complete curfew.
Also, laboratories were generally either ordered or "volunteered" to prioritise covid19 swabs over drug tests.
Quite a few would pick cancer and the record. Top athletes do all kinds of terrible damage to themselves even without the assistance of illegal drugs. Top cyclists have to wear heart rate monitors that wake them up when their heart rates get too low because their training makes their hearts so efficient that when they rest, the heart rate can get too low to be sustained. Top cyclists dying in their sleep happens far more frequently than it does for random selections of the general population. To combat this, an alarm wakes them up so they can exercise to get their heart rate up. Even knowing this, cyclists will train themselves at a level that ends up creating this condition.
> Top cyclists have to wear heart rate monitors that wake them up when their heart rates get too low because their training makes their hearts so efficient that when they rest, the heart rate can get too low to be sustained.
Do you have a source for this? I don't believe it. I tried searching for a few mins and couldn't find anything to confirm it either.
I wouldn't be surprised if cyclists die in their sleep often due to drug use. But I would be very surprised if you can literally overtrain your heart to the point of dying in your sleep due to low resting heart rate.
The commenter may have been referring to Rendell's Death of Marco Pantani which IIRC had a line that went something like "during the day he lived to ride, at night he rode to live."
It was detailed in a biography of Marco Pantani - referring to him and his peers. This was probably partly (at least) related to epo - the increased oxygen carrying capacity of the blood was probably what led to their exceptionally low heart rates.
I’ve not read about this phenomenon outside of the epo-dominated era.
There was the confession of the top Italian‘Y’and his explanation ofhow he had narrowly cheated death after a stage of the Tour of Italy.Boosted before the stage by an injection of EPO, he had gone to bed hat night and slept peacefully for two hours, unaware that the oxygen-enhanced blood, flowing through his veins, was rapidly thickening to treacle. EPO is transformed into a lethal cocktail, not during a race when the blood is pumped around the body by a 180 beats-per-minute, high-revving, super-fit, heart rate but at night when the revsdrop way below the norm. As Y’s pulse dropped to a low of twenty-fivebeats per minute, his blood began to clot and his heart began to stall.Had he not been sharing with a team-mate, there is every chance they would have found him dead in the morning...Y lived to tell the tale.Others were not so fortunate.
and Robin Parisotto wrote this:
Between 1987 and 1990, 18 cyclists died tragically and suddenly all from heart attack or stroke. EPO was known to thicken the blood the common cause of heart attack or stroke. Many victims developed clots that broke off and travelled to their hearts or brains; others died of simple cardiac arrest, the organ struggling to pump blood the consistency of oil.
These are all from [1], which is a review of the evidence as to if this actually occurred. It cast doubt on it, but I've read enough accounts to think that cyclists did believe it occurred and probably were wearing HR monitors in bed when on EPO.
Not sure about dying but here is my personal experience. I am far from being anywhere close to a real cyclist. Still I used to ride a bit too much and at some point my resting heart rate dropped down to below 45. At this point I got really scared and cut down on my cycling. Now it is more like 50 so it is ok. Funny thing I also swim a lot but it does not seem to affect my heart rate as much as cycling has.
There's a chance this tale is apocryphal, but the 90s was a pretty dark time for professional cycling and it is of course 100% drug use (EPO etc) related. I've heard this story in several cycling books/pro cycling talks usually in connection to Marco Pantani. Marco Pantani stories are often exaggerated as the man was almost like a folk hero to many fans and sad stories about his death historically sold well especially in Italy. There are a great many "legendary" stories regarding EPO use in the pro peloton in the 90s and riders were often deeply paranoid bordering on superstitious about what the training and new drugs were doing to their bodies, hence the rich vein of apocryphal tales and dubious advice.
To be clear, it's definitely not a practice that is at all required of 99% of healthy pro-cyclists! Top cyclists wear heart rate monitors to train more efficiently just like many other athletes. I could certainly believe some riders would have been _paranoid_ enough to wear one regardless of merit in bed while taking EPO though. These were often young men heavily pressured into injecting for first time etc and in 90s not like you could just google "EPO side effects" like you might today.
EPO use was rampant in cycling the 90s, largely because there was no good test to detect it widely used in sport till early 2000s, and the advantage it could confer was pretty significant in cycling - see Lance Armstrong's career.
You may be thinking of Marco Pantani, who cycled in an era of widespread EPO use which dramatically thickens their blood. That coupled with a low resting heart rate can indeed lead to death. I'm not aware of low heart rate by itself being a killer.
Top cyclists dying in their sleep happens far more frequently than it does for random selections of the general population.
That's because the performance-enhancing drug EPO thickens the blood so much that the heart can't pump it, not because of low heart rates. Low heart rate in itself is not necessarily a "condition". I assume you're slightly misremembering the details of a story similar to this one:
I’ve heard of EPO-users getting up in the middle of the night to trainer cycle because exercise increases blood flow which reduces clotting risk. Lower heart rates may cause/compound this.
Even a non-fatal minor clot in a leg or lung will doom a cyclist.
In hospitals, sedentary patients will receive anti-clotting drugs, but may not (or get reduced dosages) if they’re able to walk around a lot.
Almost all the top cyclists were on performance enhancing drugs, so it’s hard to get a good feel for whether or not what you describe is because of their training or the damage the drugs did.
That's simply a myth perpetuated to cover up the fact that they are taking EPO.
Just like the myth created by the British in WW2 that attributed the success of the RAF at night to earthing carrots to cover up the fact that they were using radar.
There was a survey or study of some sort related to this very question. My search foo fails me at the moment, but the question was directed to elite athletes: "Olympic medal and take ten (or maybe five) years off your life?". IIRC, close to half said, "where do I sign?".
Damned if I can find a link, though. It was all over every athletic-oriented magazine ten years ago. EDIT: there's even a Wikipedia page:
Exactly, something not regulated for OTC availability doesn't make it legal in WADA realm.
Moreover, many SARMs (if you believe their "advertised" effectiveness) would in the end lead to elevated hormone levels in testing.
There are a lot of available drugs (for asthma more notably) and everyday stimuli (as simple as caffeine) that (miss)used and also monitored by WADA.
In addition there are a lot of stuff undetectable or hard to detect (EPO, HGH,...) and a lot of other drugs not yet on WADA radar, that usually have a side effect of increasing endurance and stamina.
SARMs are almost a nonfactor here. SARMS are more for an everyday gym rats that are looking for the next great thing to help them out, but most of the personal feedback that reached me are - it's crap...
Yes and no. Nowadays, a lot of the anti-doping control relies on monitoring variations in levels of this and that and punishing abnormal variations (biological passport). Only rare idiots could get caught by showing huge absolute levels of this or that.
So, it is said that now, you dope young athletes before they enter the highly-controlled circuit. Then their levels can remain high and pass for their natural levels, you just have to keep the variations small by giving small continuous doses.
I guess after a long period without control, we can partly have the same effect. Of course the effect of continuous doping comes on top of the benefits (extra training or such) acquired during the non-controlled doping period.
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In cycling, there is a lot of suspicion around the young Slovenian and Swiss riders. Only unfounded suspicion so far. Several Slovenian and Swiss have already been 'caught' (nowadays cases come more from police investigation and trials than from anti-doping controls) but none of the top ones, and rather older ones or managers.
I mean, Marita Koch's 400m record from 1985 and Flo Jo's 100m and 200m records from 1988 still stand. PEDs work, and if they go away they can cause records to stand for decades.
A combination of advances in nutrition, training programs, technology and, unfortunately, performance enhancing drugs. This last point is contentious but make no mistake: PEDs are ahead of detection capabilities. I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind.
90’s baseball. I worked at Pac Bell park from beginning to opening day. When they all arrived in black SUV’s, I as shocked at the size of most of those guys, especially Bonds, and McGuire. Their heads were huge too? I had know idea about HGH, or steroids. I just thought they were fit, and strong. Bonds hit a practice ball over right field durning out work hours. It was so effortless. It was actually the first ball hit into the bay, and an electrician jumped into the water to fetch it. He wasn’t a good swimmer, so someone threw him a extension cord. It was a hot cord, and lucky blew the GFCI. (I still recall Dr. Dean Edell stating all the studies steroids/hgh show no correlation to athletic performance. Later he revised his statement, but didn’t point to new studies? I’m still not convinced. I still think Lance Armstrong won on the Placebo Effect.)
Just read accounts of people who used PEDs first time and how effective they were. Tyler Hamilton's book is an example.
When I did more weightlifting me and some other guys got stuck at around 75 kg and couldn't put on more weight no matter how hard we trained. A few months later two guys jumped to 90 kg in a very short time. I asked what's going on and they told me they got some stuff from Poland. I assume either steroids or HGH.
PEDs are way too effective for somebody to be able to compete against people who take them. It's simply not possible.
In the 100m a lot of top 10 guys got caught or evaded tests in the last years. There is no way that Bolt is beating them without taking something.
I think it's actually possible for ie bolt to be beating them without peds, I just think it isn't meaningful.
Many peds (ie testosterone) are just extra dosage of something your body produces anyways, or cause your body to increase it's rate of some metabolic process. There is a lot of variance across people anyways: perhaps Bolt just produces an exceptionally high amount of testosterone naturally. In your example, it's not that it is impossible for people without supplemental test to compete with people that have it, it's that it's impossible for someone with dramatically lower test to compete with people that have it, regardless of whether they got it naturally or by supplementation.
I would think that for sports to be as fair as possible, the real answer would be not to forbid people from supplementing, but instead to pick some acceptable level of beneficial metabolic processes and let everyone get themselves to that.
Obviously that's a bit of a crazy idea and is not likely to happen, though.
"the real answer would be not to forbid people from supplementing, but instead to pick some acceptable level of beneficial metabolic processes and let everyone get themselves to that."
that's basically how a lot of doping testing works. They don't know where the testerone comes from but assume that people will be within a certain range. In cycling they called Bjarne Riis "Mr 50%" because his hematocrite level was always exactly at the maximum allowed level.
Read Tyler Hamilton's book. It's a good read and gives a lot of insight into how doping works.
I agree with this. What's interesting to me is when you start viewing athletics as a proxy for an innate quality like endogenous testosterone, the sport loses a lot of the romance. Of course, raw athleticism (strength/speed/agility) carries more weight in some sports than others.
Bolt was fast when he was 10 years old, and probably was still naturally fast when he was 21. After any injuries though, it's likely he started peds.
I was the strongest man in one of the Bay Area gyms for a while, all natural, but essentially that was the focus of my day for several years while I worked at home (next door to the gym) and I had 10 hours of sleep nitely.
I went to a natural bobybulding conference once and all the pros were staring at me - I was huge. So it can be done while you're young, but under perfect conditions and until you get injured.
From what I know you can go pretty far without PED but good genetics. But in world class everybody has good genetics and if some of them use PED you can't beat them without. So my rule is that if people in the world top 10 get caught taking something then the other guys (especially the number 1) must be on something too. Worked with Lance Armstrong who constantly beat guys who afterwards got caught.
Just curious: How big were you? Did other people in your gym take stuff?
> So my rule is that if people in the world top 10
Sure. Most of the time that's true. However you can go a long way in your 20s if you don't get injured and you maximize the benefits of sleep, water, massage and scheduling. And let me say it again, don't get injured! :)
> How big were you?
Junior sumo weight. I know from the dust on certain weights that nobody ever unracked those except me.
A misconception is that roids are the most important thing, but nutrition/insulin are equally important, if not more. Mr. Olympias eat 10,000+ calories per day, some size monsters do 20,000 calories per day. They tend to blow out their pancreas though.
I'm sure people in the gym used both. I mean, come on.
A lot of my exercises were coincidentally the same as Arnold's (concentration curls), etc. that nobody else does now, so I would max out curl bars with 10x reps. (See Pumping Iron for great clips.) I was able to work in with pros (often the front desk would tell me as I was leaving, "Hey, you worked in with so-and-so.") Shrug. :)
People (ok, dudes) in airports would walk up to me and start feeling my biceps. I was planning to do the Inch dumbbell lift, but never got around to it.
An interesting Russian technique is not to overload muscles to exhaustion so you can do more days. (I did 3x per week for a decade, but the Russian method could be 14x per week with less intensity.)
Anyway, just some natural tips and anecdotes. Note that if you want to enter powerlifting competitions, the bench "starts" at 350 pounds, so that should be your goal if it's not just a hobby.
The year after the Festina doping scandal of the late 1990s the Tour de France, won by Lance Armstrong, was the fastest ever.
Yes, the bikes were getting better. Yes, nutrition and training were both getting better.
But they didn't get that much better in only 12 months, and so one might have expected - with the elimination of doping - that the race would have slowed somewhat.
But it didn't, because probably just about everyone - and especially the winner - were all on drugs.
There is a more than strong suspicion that the majority of dopers have never been caught and that, in some cases (including Mr Armstrong), governing bodies and authorities may have covered for and protected them. Every now and then somebody is fed to the wolves so it looks like effective action is being taken.
As a recreational activity cycling is fantastic. As a sport it's a complete joke.
That's a strange metric to pick. The Tour de France is a team race, with lots of strategy involved. It most definitely isn't about getting the lowest time, only a lower time than the competitors (very much not the same thing!).
e.g. It's common to see the entire peloton sit up and collectively agree to 'take it easy' for most of a stage to reserve energy for a sprint finish in the last 3 minutes.
So the total race time is strongly affected by the mix of team strategies.
It's also very much not a standard race year-to-year, with differing numbers of mountain stages versus flat stages, so the year-to-year times are completely incomparable.
There may still be doping the sport of cycling, but the TdF total race times would be very weak evidence for it.
The TdF has many iconic sections, mostly climbs, some time trials. They don't change often. Times are compared from year to year not over the entire 21-day race, but section by section.
> the TdF total race times would be very weak evidence for it.
Actually, the jump in TdF average speed (not total race time) during the early 1990s is fairly often attributed to EPO (and other drug) usage. The average speed in earlier events was lower because of the inconsistency - cyclists would ride much slower on days before (or after) a big stage, and this would drop the average speed for the entire race.
EPO and other drugs improved recovery so cyclists would ride hard everyday.
It's hard to know how true this is - it also corresponded to increased TV coverage for full stages, and more money in the sport. But the average speed jump after 1989 is significant.
Here's a pretty good one from 20 years ago on cycling:
In this world, the dunces and losers are those who rely on their clean physiques. Voet cites the case of Charly Mottet, a top French rider of the eighties and nineties, who came to the RMO team, where amazement was expressed that “the bloke was clean.” Mottet had, in many people’s view, the talent to win the Tour, but Voet recognized that he lacked “the wherewithal to make it happen.” In other words, he refused the tempting pharmacopoeia. Mottet was known for his weakness over the final third of the Tour, and the soigneur’s conclusion is as sad as it is hypocritical: “Yes indeed, Charly never had the career that he deserved.”
There's a long, multi-decade cat and mouse game between grey area drug manufacturers and regulators. Once labs start testing for one drug, or if a drug is banned, manufacturers develop new ones, and so on.
The Icarus documentary starts exploring PEDs and their detection but veers off into the Russian doping scandal. Regardless, it clearly shows that evasion is entirely possible with the correct guidance. I highly recommend it.
> This last point is contentious but make no mistake: PEDs are ahead of detection capabilities. I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind.
If you’re looking for links out of curiosity, below is a quote from an article where athletes were stripped of medals in 2016 for 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games.
“The IOC, which stores samples for 10 years, reanalyzed more than 1,000 samples from the 2008 Beijing Games and 2012 London Olympics with improved techniques that can detect the use of steroids going back weeks and months, rather than days.” [0]
Wikipedia has an entry [1] on stripped Olympic medals with references to the announcements.
If you’re looking to refute that statement, I can offer up an anecdote in support of the statement from a panel discussion with the former head of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) I attended during the 2010 Winter Olympics [2].
Playing baseball in my youth we had coaches who played division 1 college baseball. The phrase we were told between the ages of 14-16 was, “if you’re not cheating, you’re not competing”. That’s the college baseball wisdom that was brought back to Canada. It’s not hard for me to imagine how that can move on to taking PEDs.
That said, they disqualified about 10% of the athletes they tested. While significant, and while I'm sure that only catches a portion of offenders, it's not as high as others make it seem.
What percentage of medals went to the 10% they disqualified though? It doesn't really matter what percentage are doing it if almost everyone who wins a medal is doing it.
> I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind.
Won't detection solutions catch-up eventually? Can't they keep samples in storage and test them again years later, and at least shame the doping athletes at that time?
I suppose this isn't serving as an effective deterrent today, but it's not obvious to me why.
I don't know about what's currently used as state-of-the-art PEDs, but in theory there could very well be PEDs that are near impossible to detect, by being very quickly absorbed by the target tissue from the bloodstream. If they then also completely metabolize the drug to substances that occur normally in you body (and at non-suspicious levels), it would be very hard to detect.
The focus has switched to pushing the limits of therapeutic exemption drugs. It is amazing how many top swimmers and cyclists are asthmatic and _need_ to take the most hard core pharmaceuticals available to treat it.
Even if they are legitimately asthmatic, then it means you pretty much need to be asthmatic now to compete at the very top level. Anyway you look at it it feels wrong.
Designer PEDs. Probably importantly, increased global prosperity, more genetic variations are competing now. Last 10 years has been crazy for powerlifting records due to broader particapation.
Also style of play is a factor. In basketball, thanks to various analytics, 3 pointers are becoming more important. 3-point shooting records have been breaking all over the place these days in the NBA.
OTOH, because of the playing style changes, certain records might never be broken such as John Stockton's assists record. It was already a ridiculous record, but it would be much harder to break with the current style of play.
The Valencia Half Marathon in Dec. 2020 Kibiwott Kandie
reduced the HM WR by 30 seconds, and 4 men in total beat the old record in the same race. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/55206158
In the words of Jen Barber "the shoes!"
> There is a ban on any shoes that have a sole thicker than 40mm.
> Kandie was using Adidas shoes that have 39mm of foam.
There's also the fact that African runners train differently, and even their gait/pose is slightly different with their chests thrust out slightly.
Ethiopians and Kenyans have been dominant in track and field since the 90s, that's not exactly a recent change; both countries, btw, train fairly differently from each other, and I would contend that "gaits" differ far more between individual athletes than they do between continents. The ascendance of Uganda in the past few years has been interesting.
It's interesting because most athletes will deny records being beat due to equipment - they are afraid the result being taken away due to some regulation.
This is article is pretty light on details. There may be many reasons for the recent spat of records (most of the ones mentioned, btw, are regional), but the shoes are definitely a big contributor.
It's worth noting that 9(!) world records in track and field were set in 2020 (https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/mens-world-records/). Two of those were not on the track (pole vault, shot), and thee were set by a single individual (Cheptegei). I'm too lazy to try to dig up and chart the historical record progressions, but that does seem like a fair blip.
At the end of the day, none of these shoes is actually giving you any energy for free- they're just much less lossy than the previous generation of shoes. This feels like the right direction of progress to me.
I think the Greeks had it right when the original Olympians competed naked. Running and swimming require no equipment at all, skaters need nothing more than boots, throwing sports need no clothing. Let us see who is best without technology.
I wonder if the question has shifted some from, "who is best" to "what can humanity do?"
PEDs have some effects too macabre to make acceptable (i.e. mandatory) but there are plenty of other ways to squeeze a bit more performance out of the right human. Whether you support these strategies (shoes, training, pacer lights, etc) depends in part on what question you perceive them an answer to.
Having watched four generations of American professional sports, it’s really obvious to me that athletes should be judged by “dominance” which is implicitly based on the other athletes of the same era as a reference.
There might he a better hockey player one day than Wayne Gretzky, but I’m fairly confident in saying there will never be anyone as dominant
There is some sport-specific subtlety there too, which I’m too tired to map out right now, but it roughly goes like this: Michael Jordan was not as good at basketball as Gretzky was at hockey from a statistical perspective, but anyone who watched them knows he was just as, if not more dominant. This may be explainable through some sort of modal analysis of the sports’ talent pools - Gretzky was a ridiculous outlier.
In a weird way, MJ can be greater than WG in relation to his peers, but Gretzky was better at his sport - relative to peers - than Jordan!
There’s this weird aspect of sports that you can’t quantify, and is a large part of the allure.
This is entirely dependent on the general level of performance of all the other athletes... So it's largely arbitrary. Everyone else happening to be bad doesn't make the top athlete of that generation better than another athlete from another time.
I don't think there's anything better than to have them compete in a virtual competition based on absolute numbers, the hard part is correcting for differences in equipment, individual like shoes or collective like a track.
125 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadThe simplest predictor is "how many people practice a sport?"
Insofar as fitness for a particular athletic trial follows the central limit theorem, larger samples will open the door to more spectacular outliers. The relationship between total participants and the time it takes for a record to fall shows up in sport after sport.
The other factor is: new PEDs that are forbidden but difficult to detect at a given point in time. These affect some sports more than others. Periodically records in these sports are "reset" through administrative twiddling. For example, every 20 years or so Olympic Weightlifting weight classes get changed, meaning all the old records are essentially obsoleted.
That said, yeah, them falling more rapidly is also helped by the training/equipment/nutrition/drugs/etc improvements.
But any given combination of factors is itself part of the athletic trial. The Soviet Russian system of weightlifting carefully husbanded the outstanding weightlifters they had to work with and so selected for athletes who responded well to that training. The Bulgarian system was based on masses of warm bodies, enormous drug regimens and ruthless elimination upon injury. It selected for athletes who responded well to drugs and weren't injury prone. Afficionados of the sport argue constantly about which is "better", since both turned out world record upon world record. But such a debate was beside the point: an athletic system selects whatever it is set up to select for. The rest of the effect is then down to numbers.
Or to put it another way, since a record is defined as 'beating all previous samples', the chance of the next sample setting a record is always 1/n. So if you have m entrants per year adding to that total n, the probability is always positive, but it quickly becomes very small.
>Clinical trials of aspirin in patients without cardiovascular disease have inconsistently demonstrated improvements in cardiovascular outcomes, with potential benefits countered by increased risks of clinically significant bleeding. The uncertain role of aspirin in primary prevention of cardiovascular events is reflected in contrasting recommendations offered by guideline bodies. The overall effect of this uncertainty has been a decline in aspirin prescribing for primary prevention over the past 5 to 10 years.
Related but not mentioned: Elite sportspeople are getting paid orders of magnitude more than they have ever been in history, to promote next-generation running shoes.
Kids are expected to play a difficult movement from a major concerto for their college audition -- pieces that were considered to be the domain of a handful of rare prodigies in my generation. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the Tchaikovsky in violin recitals.
Granted, whether this corresponds to an advance in the artistic dimension of music is an open question, one that probably has no objective answer.
I only played the violin casually when I was young. But I would've loved if I had vast libraries of music, videos, etc. available to me in the 90's. I think I would've been much better.
A recent example for me is photography. When I started to learn photography about 5-6 years ago, I was able to find so many resources on the net to improve quickly. You can find so many examples of good photos of every genre these days. It would've been harder 15+ years ago if I had to scour magazines or photo books to find inspirations, or if I wanted to study a certain technique.
One piece my teacher wanted me to learn was Autumn by Vivaldi. I remember listening to my CD of Vivaldi's Four Seasons constantly to hear how a certain part should sound. Now only if I had a video, then I can see how they would've played it. :)
Teachers of my generation were afraid that if you learned by ear, you'd never learn to read.
Sure, you need to be able to read enough to get through to the point that you can memorize a new piece. However, you don't need to be able to read at the level of, say, a studio musician who sees new and unfamiliar music every single day.
Maybe I took to reading, to cover for my lack of practice. ;-) I switched to jazz after high school, and am now a double bassist. Though I'm not a full time pro, I've gotten a lot more work than I'd otherwise deserve thanks to being a fluent sight-reader and keeping my reading chops fresh.
What we can do is look at how relatively recent generations have done with some of that old material such as the Paganini.
And of course musicality, which would definitely require recordings to review. Even the kids who play these pieces will tell you: Anybody can play the notes, the trick is to play them musically.
And you can take ADD drugs to maintain attention during practice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/10/14/lights-trac...
Am I an idiot who went out way too fast for the first 600m and then died, or did I exactly hit my teammate's pace, and then fall off intentionally?
You mostly cannot get off on a technicality like this. If they judge believe that a reasonable person thinks there was a human rabbit they can DQ you even if there are other explanations.
Same with all the plausible deniability with passwords etc, the judge can simple not believe you and put you in jail until you remember the password (even if you do not remember it).
In America, you can be compelled to surrender something you have, but not something you know.
So the jail you're waiting in while you remember you password is probably in Guantanamo Bay.
Even still, race directors have even wider latitude for DQs. In the end I suppose it ultimately comes down to propensity for those in disagreement to riot.
So it appears 18 months is max for currently for refusing to decrypt a drive, but it is under active court cases at the moment.
The important thing is that you are wrong, you can clearly be forced to surrender something you know.
Edit: The important part is not that you are wrong, but that the courts can put you in jail for refusing to disclose something you know.
Nobody would be fooled by such a patently ridiculous argument. People have common sense.
For instance, in Roger Bannister's record-breaking four-minute mile run, Chris Brasher and Christopher Chataway acted as pacers. According to a prearranged plan, Brasher led the first two laps, then dropped back (and finished last). Chataway then led, until Bannister kicked with just over half a lap to go.
Because they cannot visit the athletes randomly. Because the athletes aren't training every day at a center, instead are training solo at lots of different places. Because much testing is tied to specific events (eg olympics) that have been cancelled. Cancel enough events and multi-month windows open where athletes know they will not be subject to testing.
And with fewer events, those that are still happening become much more important. If there is only one qualifying event on the calendar then there is all the more pressure to perform on that day. There is no point in saving anything for the rest of the season. So athletes will risk injury if that means doing a little better that one day. If they are hurt they know they will have have a long while to recover.
https://www.wada-ama.org/en/what-we-do/adams
Assuming that the various lockdown protocols allow it. Many countries have had (or still have) massive intra-country travel restrictions, some such as Italy had periods of complete curfew.
Also, laboratories were generally either ordered or "volunteered" to prioritise covid19 swabs over drug tests.
https://www.chemyo.com/gw501516/
Do you have a source for this? I don't believe it. I tried searching for a few mins and couldn't find anything to confirm it either.
I wouldn't be surprised if cyclists die in their sleep often due to drug use. But I would be very surprised if you can literally overtrain your heart to the point of dying in your sleep due to low resting heart rate.
I’ve not read about this phenomenon outside of the epo-dominated era.
There was the confession of the top Italian‘Y’and his explanation ofhow he had narrowly cheated death after a stage of the Tour of Italy.Boosted before the stage by an injection of EPO, he had gone to bed hat night and slept peacefully for two hours, unaware that the oxygen-enhanced blood, flowing through his veins, was rapidly thickening to treacle. EPO is transformed into a lethal cocktail, not during a race when the blood is pumped around the body by a 180 beats-per-minute, high-revving, super-fit, heart rate but at night when the revsdrop way below the norm. As Y’s pulse dropped to a low of twenty-fivebeats per minute, his blood began to clot and his heart began to stall.Had he not been sharing with a team-mate, there is every chance they would have found him dead in the morning...Y lived to tell the tale.Others were not so fortunate.
and Robin Parisotto wrote this:
Between 1987 and 1990, 18 cyclists died tragically and suddenly all from heart attack or stroke. EPO was known to thicken the blood the common cause of heart attack or stroke. Many victims developed clots that broke off and travelled to their hearts or brains; others died of simple cardiac arrest, the organ struggling to pump blood the consistency of oil.
These are all from [1], which is a review of the evidence as to if this actually occurred. It cast doubt on it, but I've read enough accounts to think that cyclists did believe it occurred and probably were wearing HR monitors in bed when on EPO.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/17460263.2011.55...
Curious if I get downvoted for this as well.
To be clear, it's definitely not a practice that is at all required of 99% of healthy pro-cyclists! Top cyclists wear heart rate monitors to train more efficiently just like many other athletes. I could certainly believe some riders would have been _paranoid_ enough to wear one regardless of merit in bed while taking EPO though. These were often young men heavily pressured into injecting for first time etc and in 90s not like you could just google "EPO side effects" like you might today.
EPO use was rampant in cycling the 90s, largely because there was no good test to detect it widely used in sport till early 2000s, and the advantage it could confer was pretty significant in cycling - see Lance Armstrong's career.
That's because the performance-enhancing drug EPO thickens the blood so much that the heart can't pump it, not because of low heart rates. Low heart rate in itself is not necessarily a "condition". I assume you're slightly misremembering the details of a story similar to this one:
https://www.ridemedia.com.au/features/epo-and-the-spate-of-s...
I’ve heard of EPO-users getting up in the middle of the night to trainer cycle because exercise increases blood flow which reduces clotting risk. Lower heart rates may cause/compound this.
Even a non-fatal minor clot in a leg or lung will doom a cyclist.
In hospitals, sedentary patients will receive anti-clotting drugs, but may not (or get reduced dosages) if they’re able to walk around a lot.
Just like the myth created by the British in WW2 that attributed the success of the RAF at night to earthing carrots to cover up the fact that they were using radar.
Damned if I can find a link, though. It was all over every athletic-oriented magazine ten years ago. EDIT: there's even a Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldman%27s_dilemma
You only have to walk into any local gym to find people who do terrible things to themselves for no more than an Instagram selfie
https://www.wada-ama.org/en/content/what-is-prohibited/prohi...
There are a lot of available drugs (for asthma more notably) and everyday stimuli (as simple as caffeine) that (miss)used and also monitored by WADA.
In addition there are a lot of stuff undetectable or hard to detect (EPO, HGH,...) and a lot of other drugs not yet on WADA radar, that usually have a side effect of increasing endurance and stamina.
SARMs are almost a nonfactor here. SARMS are more for an everyday gym rats that are looking for the next great thing to help them out, but most of the personal feedback that reached me are - it's crap...
So, it is said that now, you dope young athletes before they enter the highly-controlled circuit. Then their levels can remain high and pass for their natural levels, you just have to keep the variations small by giving small continuous doses.
I guess after a long period without control, we can partly have the same effect. Of course the effect of continuous doping comes on top of the benefits (extra training or such) acquired during the non-controlled doping period.
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In cycling, there is a lot of suspicion around the young Slovenian and Swiss riders. Only unfounded suspicion so far. Several Slovenian and Swiss have already been 'caught' (nowadays cases come more from police investigation and trials than from anti-doping controls) but none of the top ones, and rather older ones or managers.
When I did more weightlifting me and some other guys got stuck at around 75 kg and couldn't put on more weight no matter how hard we trained. A few months later two guys jumped to 90 kg in a very short time. I asked what's going on and they told me they got some stuff from Poland. I assume either steroids or HGH.
PEDs are way too effective for somebody to be able to compete against people who take them. It's simply not possible.
In the 100m a lot of top 10 guys got caught or evaded tests in the last years. There is no way that Bolt is beating them without taking something.
Many peds (ie testosterone) are just extra dosage of something your body produces anyways, or cause your body to increase it's rate of some metabolic process. There is a lot of variance across people anyways: perhaps Bolt just produces an exceptionally high amount of testosterone naturally. In your example, it's not that it is impossible for people without supplemental test to compete with people that have it, it's that it's impossible for someone with dramatically lower test to compete with people that have it, regardless of whether they got it naturally or by supplementation.
I would think that for sports to be as fair as possible, the real answer would be not to forbid people from supplementing, but instead to pick some acceptable level of beneficial metabolic processes and let everyone get themselves to that.
Obviously that's a bit of a crazy idea and is not likely to happen, though.
that's basically how a lot of doping testing works. They don't know where the testerone comes from but assume that people will be within a certain range. In cycling they called Bjarne Riis "Mr 50%" because his hematocrite level was always exactly at the maximum allowed level.
Read Tyler Hamilton's book. It's a good read and gives a lot of insight into how doping works.
That’s what top sports is. It’s people who won the genetic lottery and then also worked hard.
I was the strongest man in one of the Bay Area gyms for a while, all natural, but essentially that was the focus of my day for several years while I worked at home (next door to the gym) and I had 10 hours of sleep nitely.
I went to a natural bobybulding conference once and all the pros were staring at me - I was huge. So it can be done while you're young, but under perfect conditions and until you get injured.
Just curious: How big were you? Did other people in your gym take stuff?
Sure. Most of the time that's true. However you can go a long way in your 20s if you don't get injured and you maximize the benefits of sleep, water, massage and scheduling. And let me say it again, don't get injured! :)
> How big were you?
Junior sumo weight. I know from the dust on certain weights that nobody ever unracked those except me.
A misconception is that roids are the most important thing, but nutrition/insulin are equally important, if not more. Mr. Olympias eat 10,000+ calories per day, some size monsters do 20,000 calories per day. They tend to blow out their pancreas though.
I'm sure people in the gym used both. I mean, come on.
A lot of my exercises were coincidentally the same as Arnold's (concentration curls), etc. that nobody else does now, so I would max out curl bars with 10x reps. (See Pumping Iron for great clips.) I was able to work in with pros (often the front desk would tell me as I was leaving, "Hey, you worked in with so-and-so.") Shrug. :)
People (ok, dudes) in airports would walk up to me and start feeling my biceps. I was planning to do the Inch dumbbell lift, but never got around to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Inch#The_'Thomas_Inch'_...
An interesting Russian technique is not to overload muscles to exhaustion so you can do more days. (I did 3x per week for a decade, but the Russian method could be 14x per week with less intensity.)
Anyway, just some natural tips and anecdotes. Note that if you want to enter powerlifting competitions, the bench "starts" at 350 pounds, so that should be your goal if it's not just a hobby.
It's a really good book. I read it as somebody with no interest in cycling and the world it painted was fascinating.
The year after the Festina doping scandal of the late 1990s the Tour de France, won by Lance Armstrong, was the fastest ever.
Yes, the bikes were getting better. Yes, nutrition and training were both getting better.
But they didn't get that much better in only 12 months, and so one might have expected - with the elimination of doping - that the race would have slowed somewhat.
But it didn't, because probably just about everyone - and especially the winner - were all on drugs.
Here's a list covering the period up to and include 2019 of confirmed cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_doping_cases_in_cyclin...
There is a more than strong suspicion that the majority of dopers have never been caught and that, in some cases (including Mr Armstrong), governing bodies and authorities may have covered for and protected them. Every now and then somebody is fed to the wolves so it looks like effective action is being taken.
As a recreational activity cycling is fantastic. As a sport it's a complete joke.
e.g. It's common to see the entire peloton sit up and collectively agree to 'take it easy' for most of a stage to reserve energy for a sprint finish in the last 3 minutes. So the total race time is strongly affected by the mix of team strategies.
It's also very much not a standard race year-to-year, with differing numbers of mountain stages versus flat stages, so the year-to-year times are completely incomparable.
There may still be doping the sport of cycling, but the TdF total race times would be very weak evidence for it.
Actually, the jump in TdF average speed (not total race time) during the early 1990s is fairly often attributed to EPO (and other drug) usage. The average speed in earlier events was lower because of the inconsistency - cyclists would ride much slower on days before (or after) a big stage, and this would drop the average speed for the entire race.
EPO and other drugs improved recovery so cyclists would ride hard everyday.
It's hard to know how true this is - it also corresponded to increased TV coverage for full stages, and more money in the sport. But the average speed jump after 1989 is significant.
In this world, the dunces and losers are those who rely on their clean physiques. Voet cites the case of Charly Mottet, a top French rider of the eighties and nineties, who came to the RMO team, where amazement was expressed that “the bloke was clean.” Mottet had, in many people’s view, the talent to win the Tour, but Voet recognized that he lacked “the wherewithal to make it happen.” In other words, he refused the tempting pharmacopoeia. Mottet was known for his weakness over the final third of the Tour, and the soigneur’s conclusion is as sad as it is hypocritical: “Yes indeed, Charly never had the career that he deserved.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/08/21/the-hardest-te...
It ends up inevitably being about Lance Armstrong. This was 10 years before he owned up to doping.
> This last point is contentious but make no mistake: PEDs are ahead of detection capabilities. I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind.
If you’re looking for links out of curiosity, below is a quote from an article where athletes were stripped of medals in 2016 for 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games.
“The IOC, which stores samples for 10 years, reanalyzed more than 1,000 samples from the 2008 Beijing Games and 2012 London Olympics with improved techniques that can detect the use of steroids going back weeks and months, rather than days.” [0]
Wikipedia has an entry [1] on stripped Olympic medals with references to the announcements.
If you’re looking to refute that statement, I can offer up an anecdote in support of the statement from a panel discussion with the former head of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) I attended during the 2010 Winter Olympics [2].
Playing baseball in my youth we had coaches who played division 1 college baseball. The phrase we were told between the ages of 14-16 was, “if you’re not cheating, you’re not competing”. That’s the college baseball wisdom that was brought back to Canada. It’s not hard for me to imagine how that can move on to taking PEDs.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/sports/olympics/olympic-medals-stripped-d...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stripped_Olympic_med...
[2] https://chancentre.com/events/sport-society-sport-ethics-tec...
That said, they disqualified about 10% of the athletes they tested. While significant, and while I'm sure that only catches a portion of offenders, it's not as high as others make it seem.
Won't detection solutions catch-up eventually? Can't they keep samples in storage and test them again years later, and at least shame the doping athletes at that time?
I suppose this isn't serving as an effective deterrent today, but it's not obvious to me why.
OTOH, because of the playing style changes, certain records might never be broken such as John Stockton's assists record. It was already a ridiculous record, but it would be much harder to break with the current style of play.
In the words of Jen Barber "the shoes!"
> There is a ban on any shoes that have a sole thicker than 40mm. > Kandie was using Adidas shoes that have 39mm of foam.
There's also the fact that African runners train differently, and even their gait/pose is slightly different with their chests thrust out slightly.
It's worth noting that 9(!) world records in track and field were set in 2020 (https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/mens-world-records/). Two of those were not on the track (pole vault, shot), and thee were set by a single individual (Cheptegei). I'm too lazy to try to dig up and chart the historical record progressions, but that does seem like a fair blip.
Myself, and virtually every competitive runner that I know at the amateur level, has invested in so called "super shoes" from one of the various manufacturers, with impressive (relative) results- generally, everyone has PR'd since the switch. Aside from that small sample set, numerous other studies have shown that the shoes deliver: - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/upshot/nike-v... - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-1024-z
At the end of the day, none of these shoes is actually giving you any energy for free- they're just much less lossy than the previous generation of shoes. This feels like the right direction of progress to me.
PEDs have some effects too macabre to make acceptable (i.e. mandatory) but there are plenty of other ways to squeeze a bit more performance out of the right human. Whether you support these strategies (shoes, training, pacer lights, etc) depends in part on what question you perceive them an answer to.
There might he a better hockey player one day than Wayne Gretzky, but I’m fairly confident in saying there will never be anyone as dominant
There is some sport-specific subtlety there too, which I’m too tired to map out right now, but it roughly goes like this: Michael Jordan was not as good at basketball as Gretzky was at hockey from a statistical perspective, but anyone who watched them knows he was just as, if not more dominant. This may be explainable through some sort of modal analysis of the sports’ talent pools - Gretzky was a ridiculous outlier.
In a weird way, MJ can be greater than WG in relation to his peers, but Gretzky was better at his sport - relative to peers - than Jordan!
There’s this weird aspect of sports that you can’t quantify, and is a large part of the allure.
I don't think there's anything better than to have them compete in a virtual competition based on absolute numbers, the hard part is correcting for differences in equipment, individual like shoes or collective like a track.
What’s more impressive is pushing the boundaries of a sport - ie, being good while others suck.